


The World in Brief

by TheWillowBends



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Genre: Angst and Romance, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other, Shorts, some canon some au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-08-04 05:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 4,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16340666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWillowBends/pseuds/TheWillowBends
Summary: A collection of five minute drabbles. Individual details/warnings at top of chapter.  Multiple pairings, multiple canons, plenty of AU.  Infrequently updated.





	1. Other Side of the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Windwaker  
>  **Warnings:** PG - one  
>  disturbing image.  
>  **Characters:** Tetra  
>  **Theme:** The  
>  Hanged Man

Tetra's world is one of ocean; endless, stretching hands of sallow blue that swallow the world, bottom to sky, where even the clouds mingle with tides when the sun is high. She can't imagine this Hyrule, with its dust and its green and its heavenly firmament as anything more than fiction, the empty movement of whispers and the hope of people too small to bridge the great divide. Her world is too tremulous, too fractious for the rigidity of ground, the structure of forests and mountains and sky; she'd rather the boundless feel of a world in motion, spread out heavy and lifeless and unsure beneath her, like the sudden weight of the hanged man.

She built her dreams pitch to sails and stood steady as the mast - but love is the tar that held it together, and love of the world is what tore it apart. And goddess knows she'd like to levy blame where blame is meant to be but -

A ship without wind is dead on the water; it is better, she feels, to let it sink.


	2. Every Time the Wind Blows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
>  **Rating:** G  
>  **Characters:** Link/Midna  
>  **Theme:** Word was "scent."

His days are stratified into sections of sight and smell: the brisk, anticipatory swell of morning, the sharp pummel of the noonday sun, the cold, anxious musk of night, with its pitfalls and mystery.

Somewhere she has a place, veiled in her shadows and her shame, huddled beneath all those intangible layers of that world that wasn't. He thinks of her only when the day is nearing its end, reclining to its rustic sfumato of twilight, and she is steady in his thoughts then, like the stream that pushes relentlessly to a dissipate point beyond the horizon.

And it not necessarily that the world is so old or so dark or so cold without her, but sometimes...

He wonders who casts shadows for her now.


	3. Clumsy, Stupid Alice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Majora's Mask  
>  **Rating:** PG  
>  **Characters:**  
>  Link  
>  **Theme:** Word was "drugs."

The stars were playing symphonies and sounding off horns when he first ascended; he strummed his fingers along the thin, striated harp of clouds and imagined him part of that choir as the clock began to wind down, its hands moving strained and stubbornly against the world he'd made sluggish.

In town of endless ticking, they had called him "child," and bar owners had tossed him to the streets, but the soldiers at the bridge had laughed to see his sword and told him that any boy who tried the blade was a man in their eyes, and they had shown him the way to paradise in the bottom of a tin cup.

He closed one eye and made a temporary kaleidoscope of the world, which spun under his feet with the rapid flair of a top, and fell to his back so he could watch the world fall apart. In his mind's eye, he could imagine the Skull Kid at the helm of his time-ender and fancied him a composer - how does one play to the apocalypse proper? - and the stars glittered dangerously and the moon smiled like a Chesire Cat, heavy and hot above him.

And tomorrow (tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow) the world is going to end and he will have to save it (again - but what does it matter, if everybody dies anyway?), but for now he is alone and the sky is firing off its ten gun salute at the fall of the curtain, and for one night, Link is as dizzy and empty and weightless as Alice in Wonderland, laid to rest in her valley of flowers.


	4. Everything by Halves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
>  **Warnings:** PG-13; mild adult references  
>  **Characters:** Link/Ilia  
>  **Theme:** The World

Sometimes she is sweetest when the morning is new and drifting over the land like the clumsy run of egg yolk. Sometimes she is sweetest when the moon is full and heavy and drunk on its dark, heady night wine. Sometimes, she is not sweet at all, but he calls her that anyway. She is best when she is ripe, fiercely happy and flighty and still somewhat girlish for all that she is woman, and they make quite a pair (since these days he feels like half a man).

He thinks of the world before and after her and in between, with the wolf's howl and the wolf's sharpness and wolf's smell, and he can't picture her in it, soft and smooth and spread beneath him with her hands fisting his hair and her mouth hard against his, but he wants to consume her all the same. ( _And there is nothing bad about that_ , she murmurs against his ear, _if she gets to have him all._ )

Link breathes in the scent of twilight and breaths out the scent of day.


	5. Stupid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
>  **Warnings:** PG  
>  **Characters:** Ilia, implied Link/Midna  
>  **Theme:**  
>  emotions - stupid

Stupid, she thinks, while stripping the laundry from the line. Stupid, she whispers, while clutching broken glass. Stupid, she curses in the night, with her hands fisting her hair and her face hot against the pillow.

It becomes her mantra, invoking rage where blame sits heavy. It levies its load on her heart along with the scraps and the bits he left of it - all of her memories and fond wishes and assortment of dreams a pile of refuse, scattered like dust to the wind or leaves to the fall, useless and lapsed.

She wants him eviscerated, all his sins and love poured out before him, all his vital pieces laid naked to her eye. Everything that is in him that is him or not him or wasn't him and now is; everything that is honest and forthright to everybody but her; all of his ramparts, his sentries carefully lining the walls of his heart, shot down and put to ruin before her.

The agony of inquiry burns her throat, stiffens her back, coarsens her tongue -

 _Why did you leave?_ she wants to ask.

 _Where are you going?_ she wants to shake him.

 _Who is she?_ she wants to scream.

Stupid, she thinks, and laces her hands, tightens her corset, her smile, her heart, while life goes on.


	6. Bed of Roses, Bed of Thorns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Game:**  
>  Twilight Princess - one-sided Zelda/Ilia, implied Ilia/Link  
>  **Rating:**  
>  PG-13, adult references  
>  **Theme:** Pissed

At first it was letters, and she scribbled the Hylian alphabet in feverish circles around the ink well, blotted out furiously all the 'L' and 'I' and "YOU"s that made a heart and a home and put a meaning to the sterility of linguistics. She wanted a living tongue, a working play of histrionics, shrieking and accusations and all those desperate pieces that make things fall apart, but at first, all she had was her study and her parchment and the too quiet of a world without voice.

Soon the walls quivered with emotion, the air crackled with the words she couldn't say, the words the world wouldn't bear said, and she stormed every chamber and ransacked every good she had to their name long after there was no longer a name to be had for them. The flowers, neglected and despairing, wilted in her absence, and later she threw the vase over the balcony to crash somewhere in the garden below and thought viciously that it was better in the common dirt where it belonged, and went to make war upon the bed, too big and too open for a world writ in singular and past tense, and out the window it went too, frame upon pillows upon every living intimacy alive in the wrinkle of its sheets. Out, she wished it - OUT OUT! she screamed, and let all of their letters fly down in a tumult of white parchment rain, all of her hopes in discrete, unfinished pieces at the bottom of a ruined castle that no longer had a place for her.

Anger follows like a crow, irritable and peckish, constantly drilling in her ear; grief lowers like a shroud, but she will not see its triumph. Sometimes, she is fierce and hot and almost explosive -

"Do you remember the garden we tended?" she asks.

"What of the books you left behind?" she wonders.

"The bed in which I fucked you senseless?" she is honestly curious.

"Would he love you any better than I did?" she sneers and scorns and wishes otherwise.

She sits on a throne like a true queen, stiff and stunning and completely unattainable by any lesser hand (as if to say, "mercy have the lady that turns her face aside!"), and tries not to think of how she has taken to burning books and tearing coverlets and all of the unseemly things a queen in love might do.


	7. Every New Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Windwaker  
>  **Warnings:** None  
>  **Characters:** Link (implied one-sided Link/Tetra)  
>  **Theme:** lyrics - "phantasmagoric monsters"

He knows that she hates mornings like wind hates water, crashing in mercilessly with a bellow and a shout, and that is why he pesters her mainly in evenings, when the word is settling sleepily against itself, hazy and horizontal. She is softer then, all of her thinking floating aimlessly around her, spread out weighty and lapsed beneath the girth of her conscience.

He likes to think himself a lesser bother, amidst all the heavy things inside her heart, but he knows that time and space frequently serve only to echo and enlarge the smaller concerns in life, and his attempts to wedge himself into the span of her affairs is not so subtle to go without notice. If he is to serve a grievance, he likes to think himself a productive sort, and he has bartered passage into her heart with promise of fortune, though of what kind he is uncertain. He would like to promise something, somewhere between the fumbling of his mouth and spirit, anything to place a value to his presence in her life, though she is short in her return.

Today he has failed to make much of himself; yesterday is a breath goodbye, and he wonders at the future spreading out like some phantasmagoric monster, steady and dreadful and bold before them, whether tomorrow he will be more than a bother that he was today and whether there is wealth in being noticed.

He supposes that will have to wait for evening.


	8. Turning, Turning, We Come Round Right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Game:**  
>  Twilight Princess, Alternate Universe - Zelda/Ilia/Telma  
>  **Warnings:**  
>  PG; mature themes  
>  **Theme:** fags

How do you fall in love with cigarettes and bubblegum?

This is Ilia's Question of the Decade, a sort of sudden shuffling of motives amidst other petty concerns (she knows, she knows - though she feels she's getting better). Last year it was, "What did Jesus know of loving if all he knew was love?" The year before that it was, "What is the missing tie between arithmetic and necrophilia?" (The answer, always, always, is forty-two.)

She scribbles in Sanskrit and babbles in foreign tongues - at least, it's all arcane speech to human ears, and she doubts Zelda passes the test for patience where her stuttering is concerned. But Zelda doesn't know (can't know, wouldn't know, couldn't care to know) about the woman at the bar, behind her fortress of ale and sentries of chipped glasses and all of the barriers age and circumstance has built her. She had looked so sad that day against the back alley wall, picking at gum stuck to the heels of her faded pumps and puffing listlessly at the end of a burnt-out fag, like if God had a moment to distill all of the agonies of unhappiness and prosaics in the bosom of Eve, he'd have placed her here in the grit and the smoky air of a cheap bar and called it Creation: The Second Act, better and more beautiful than any Adam could have hoped.

God, Ilia thinks, God has nothing on that torn leather shoe and the shaky clasp of that old corset, and neither does Zelda, with her perky breasts and perfect heels, and she is drowning in liquid fire and second-hand smoke.

How do you fall in love with cigarettes and bubblegum?

Fall in love with the woman first.


	9. Going Nowhere, Noplace Fast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Twilight Princess AU  
>  **Warnings:** None.  
>  **Characters:** Ilia/Zelda  
>  **Theme:** lyrics "cornbread fag."I can't recall the name of the song off the top of my head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Informal sequel to the previous chapter.

On Sunday, she thought: "I could pretend to still love you, if you could pretend we could get through this week."

On Monday, over coffee: "Don't leave the keys near the door. It makes for too easy an escape."

On Tuesday, burying her dead garden: "The problem with Nietzsche is that he's always too right."

On Wednesday, during lunch: "The real problem is that you're a cornbread fag, through and through: a little buttering up never made up for simplicity."

On Thursday, scrubbing kitchens: "I always knew it would come to this - the problem was trying not to care."

On Friday, while weeping: "What is the purpose of falling in love, if it's so easy to fall out of it?"

On Saturday, she said: "I think trying is just another way of cutting corners."

And so she didn't anymore.


	10. But They're Always Good for Running

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Twilight Princess (AU)  
>  **Warnings:** None.  
>  **Characters:** Ilia, Zelda  
>  **Theme:** lyrics - "tennis shoes aren't meant for tennis"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Third drabble in series starting with "Turning, Turning, We Come Round Right"

"Tennis shoes aren't meant for tennis," Ilia says to Zelda one day while they are drinking on the deck. She is thinking this is something new, to say out loud what is otherwise assumed. Art is just mimetic speech in conceptual tongues, and Ilia is no artist, but she certainly is here to tell a story.

"I don't park in my driveway," she muses on another, "But I drive on the parkway. How crazy is that?" The world is sideways, backwards, upside-down and she hates it.

"Broken ankles are just God's way of saying high-heels are accidents in wait," just like snakes in the grass or falling in love, and she cries recklessly over back alleys and Zelda's perfectly scandalous, naked ankle draped over the bed.

"I don't think I'm in love with you anymore," she says and walks out of the door -

\- and

out

of

her

life.


	11. A History of Sins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Twilight Princess
> 
>  **Warnings:** Implied intimacy.
> 
>  **Characters:** Shad/Ilia
> 
>  **Theme:** Word - fable

"Let me tell you a story," he says to her ear, which is not quite the same as to her face, but she understands that some fables easier to tell without sight, so she accepts this misdirected sort of telling.

"Let me tell you about heroes," he says another time, this time to her knee, which is sharp and angular against his chin, and he tells her all the things she didn't know about the man she'd grown to love growing up.

"Let me tell you about tragedy," he weaves a story about unrequited love against her empty belly, about queens and scholars and little farm girls who never knew better for what they had but fell in love with heroes all the same, and Ilia can't help but weep against his shoulder in a fit of hysteria, the kind of histrionics the notoriously insignificant bend to because that is their only hope of being noticed.

"Let me tell you about love," she says once, hot and explosive against his neck, "let me tell you about all the things you men of notes can't find in those papers, those studies, those pointless, _fucking_ books of yours."

"Let me tell you what it's like to be left in dusty pockets of non-existence," she says, "And I will show you what history is really about."

And for all the man that is, Shad listens.


	12. Castles Without Queens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Twilight Princess
> 
>  **Warnings:** Mild sexuality.
> 
>  **Characters:** Zelda/Ilia
> 
>  **Theme:** N/A

"What would you do without me?" Ilia said enthusiastically as she kissed her way up Zelda's leg. Ilia is never quite so cruel, but the inquiry hangs in the air: Marry well? Mother a few trollish children? (You would make a mockery of love without me! her kisses always seem to say.)

"I'd be a me without a you," Zelda said honestly stretching out over the bed, looking as whole and happy as purest love, because what else is there to do? A world without Ilia is a world without four corners and the shackle she's made herself, and she no longer knows what it looks like looking in. "What would I do without you?" because it is a question and an answer that bears repeating, like all of the petty things racked up inside her heart.

Maybe a marry a man, any sort of whore, the kind who come seeking a hand for great fortune and a place in the womb of a woman, but who wants that? Really wants it, the way drunkards are to divine ale or monks seek holy script, all those things good men can't bring? Trapped in this coordinated clockwork circle of suitors and councils and rolling courts, Zelda can only think of dusty fingernails and infrequent bathing, all those dirty things that make a common slut, though she would never want her love to feel that way.

"What are the letters that make 'I love you,'" she asks, half because she's drunk on love and half because she can't stand it.

"All the letters that spell your name," Ilia says, and makes a molehill of manly exploits.


	13. That Burns Like Cigarettes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Ocarina of Time (mild AU)  
>  **Warnings:**  
>  Adult references.  
>  **Characters:** Link/Malon  
>  **Theme:**  
>  lyrics for Cake's "Short Skirt, Long Jacket"

"It's called smooooooth liquidation," he says swaying toward her like a tiger on vaseline (better than David Bowie imagined!), dancing forward in a jaunty, ungraceful motion of inebriated hip thrusting and un-rhythm, the kind that would make music unwind to see it, but fuck sound-motion, fuck lyrics - all it does is make her laugh and that is something worth singing about.

He skirted the edge of the bed and its jutting sword sides, ready to cut hips and bruise egos, and collapsed into the pile of her pillows like a sack of lively, drunken potatoes. "I'm trading in my MG for a Chrysler Lebanon - shit, how did it go again?!"

"Hell if I know," she says, all downward motion, like a toppling Kali - all flailing arms and feminine wile - collapsing with cement-brick-heavy on his chest, and that's all the weight he's willing and ready to bear right now, dizzy like a spinning top filled up with bubblegum rum, and he giggles almost like a girl when he feels her fingers preying on the tangled laces of his trousers while wishing for Shirley Temple cherries and martini olives.

Music fumbled in his mouth along with her hair and something that wanted a voice but didn't have one. It might have come out as "I love you," but Cake rambled manically, "I want a girl who cuts through ribbons with a machete - "

"I have a pitch fork," she grinned against his navel.

He knew that, but goddamnit, he wanted that machete -

\- but alas!

(he falls in love with her anyway).


	14. Big Easy, Little Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** It's either post-Majora's Mask or post-Phantom Hourglass. I couldn't decide.  
>  **Warnings:** Mature themes.  
>  **Characters:** Link  
>  **Theme:** Phrase "titillating titties." Yeah, I don't know what that has anything to do with this, either.

He's done the big-little thing in the big, big world, so he decides at age thirteen times three-sixty-five and a quarter year that he is greater than the sum of his parts and makes The Big Score the number one agenda of a new age post-fairy little-big boy. There's a big world out there, after all, and he's just tall enough these days and see up and over the little things, so he feels it's time to cast them aside (which is the Number One Lie of Boys-Who-Think-They-Are-Men).

The succession of adult principles goes as follow: manhood is an act of bartering what is paltry for greater pieces of the whole. In this way, daggers become swords, booze forgoes failure, love begets whores, and flying becomes synonymous for how far you can fall. He falls in love with big fortunes, big scores (count them up - whores come easy with big money \- 1, 2, 3, 42 and that was the peak of it), big dreams that died heavy in his all-too-little heart.

This was the Big World as Grownups Knew It, and he was not prepared at all, at all, at all for the Big Costs it Came With, but he believes that he is happy.

He really does.


	15. Threadbare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Majora's Mask  
>  **Warnings:** None  
>  **Characters:** Link/Viscen  
>  **Theme:** nothing

Nothing really makes any sense at all. Not after the goddesses show him that arithmetic is a practice of fallacy, and he falls back seven years in a circle with no standard circumference to the self. This is the self that doesn't really exist any longer, he thinks, long after the sword has excised the pieces of he who was a boy - but a boy he is, and so agrees the clock in the town of endless ticking, the land of non-opportunity and other human things.

The guard at the gate has no face and no name in his world, but this is only fair, since this is a world where he had no face and no name, but they are still themselves - and that, THAT, is the most important variable of them all, independent of x raised to the second power, em cee squared, and other abuses of the time space continuum he might contemplate.

Because

because

If there is a place where you exist, faceless and nameless and bereft of the self...

Isn't that always where you were meant to be?


	16. Deus ex Machina

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Wind Waker  
>  **Warnings:** None  
>  **Characters:** The Hero of the Winds  
>  **Theme:** kinesis

He is a tornado, a twister of high velocity wind, cyclone force - in the islands, they'd called him the Wind Waker, but now he is the electric energy of sound space motion, cutting corners and undermining soft bellies at the edge of the blue steel sky sword. Master of the elements, king of the titan windbag - the boat of legends and red wood could mend his kingdom on self-doubt and gold lust, but he is the human grit stirring the hurricane punch. Sudden, cyclical SLICE! down goes the knight of no fancy, in bifolds the elemental sorcerer, stirring wickedness and boiled air, but he is no match for this wind tunnel, sound-motion-spin - off the edge of the map and into the world of monsters he's gone, and he's not coming back, but -

\- in islands they called him the watching boy, fast and furious and bent for higher callings but now he is simply

kinesis;

wind warrior;

the god machine;

\- Hero.


	17. Super Sonic Friction Blast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Super Smash Brothers Brawl  
>  **Characters:** Link/Snake  
>  **Summary** : it's all about kinetics  
>  **Other:** First line from anawesomeblossom

It was from a crash course in coming-of-age that he learned that matters dealing with attraction and want weren't that simple. Not like physics, that calculating predator of far out spacial proportions and hot shot cannonball arc range, the span of which in its timely, Einstein fashion stretched its moment ad infinitum, including this one - and on and on he could go but - 

There was the professor at the lake - the crazy one! that nobody spoke of, and he was old, old, old, and still thought the world could be crunched and trampled down into the minute space of arithmetic perceptions, and he'd tried to teach Link, who wouldn't be taught beyond trajectory and the motion thereof 

and he remembers - 

ENERGY [potential; kinetic.] 

\- but he hadn't grasped the breadth of it until now, this moment in time amidst other times that existed in the long span of transient infinity, of this room and this bed, wide and open and full of 

potential? 

Could it be kinesis? What would it take? In this room full of anticipatory actions, which only needed a place, a motion to exist and to be, between them, two men in tights, of little words and greater actions and the headoverheelsforwardfumblingmotion into something that wasn't 

quite 

(maybe?) 

love.


	18. That Which Heals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Game: Majora's Mask  
> Rating: K+  
> Warnings: References to child harm.  
> Characters: Link (Hero of Time), Pamela

The magic holds true, even tested with the weight of heavier sins. He plays to the stars, and the matter of earth reforms, the knitting of bone and reformation of spirit. In his hands, he holds the power of liminal spaces, the doorway through which time and space pass around him, through him, pushing him effortlessly toward futures incalculable.

The girl looks at him with grace and suspicion, and in her he sees the questions he cannot offer and will not indulge. Time moves, and he must move with it, forward and even back again, the locomotion of gears in the clock ever turning. The silence gathers like vines, grown up around the whole of them, but he has learned to cultivate it well. It is his companion when words falter, and they always do.

In her, he can see eternity, all potentialities of living and death, mercy and grief, and this he can give her, will give her, if only because the world is so spare otherwise. In a thousand unfinished futures, she dies alone and frightened and too young, but not in this one, not by his hand and no other.

(Somewhere out there, he imagines, there is a future for him. He must imagine it now, a place where song rings out with good and potent clarity, with joy and light and healing, the power to put even him back together again.)


	19. Full of Grace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Ocarina of Time  
>  **Warnings:** Existentialist dread  
>  **Characters:** Sheik (Link/Zelda by association)  
>  **Theme:** motherhood

He was born in a winter: that he remembered, between the cold and the shadow and the sudden self. All it took was a spell and a wish and a want, and out he came like a hatched bird, explosive and fragmented and new. This is not like human births - or he doesn't think so; violent though they may be, they come forth expected. The awkwardness of the ordeal stuck with him, the advent of seven years consummation, and he thought of the shadow frequently between the girl and the man and the space inside them and knew that he would go back to it, much like everything else.

Logically, he knows that the boy-Hero is something Normal, or was once, and that he had a coming and has a going, even with seven years blanked in dream-slate sleep. His own tabula rasa, clean and smooth as the infant mind, and Sheik is there to fill in the gaps - or that the girl-child inside made him say? But the boy can't remember the womb before the forest, and the girl can't remember anything at all, so Sheik feels something like life living for them, waiting for the world again.

In the end, he knows, there will be the girl and a boy and no room for the rags and that, he thinks, is something like motherhood, bringing children into the world made new and shiny and wiped clean of the smoke and ember of past life. And then he will die, and out of the womb of the shadow and into the earth and back to the darkness he will go (and will it be any different? he wonders), waiting to be born again, and that will be his spring.

He finds some peace in that.


	20. Boxed In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Timeline:** Phantom Hourglass   
> **Warnings:** Violence   
> **Characters:** Linebeck/Jolene   
> **Theme:** word - gold

When she finds him, she will slit him sideways. There is no persuading her otherwise; Jolene is not a woman to be shaken like a loose sail, but firmly anchored to her cause - and Linebeck knows this well (and so does the crate), but there aren't the words to explain this to the boy. Not quite yet, anyway. There are still treasures to be had, a wish buried in his heart, a promise good as gold, so there is still comfort in the sharp click of sliding blades. 

He, himself, has never tried the sword, so he cuts her down the only way a man can - skirting truth and dodgy words, and nothing seems to work to much avail, but he supposes that was always half the game. There is a sense of something left unfinished; a curious sensation he has no mind for, nor does he wish to dwell on the things he assumes past. She is stuck in a rut, a ship beached - so he says! - and this is not a route he is eager to follow. 

Confrontation draws near; he can't run forever. He is on a collision course with world much bigger than his own, and the fear of being capsized and left drifting is heavy on his heart. The feeling settles deep in his gut like malady or sin (he can't decide which), seized by the sense of inevitable; he is not quite sure what he will do when there is nothing to separate them, no swords and no silence and no ocean between them, and he is terrified to think what she will take to make things split even. 

But for now there is a boy and his ship and a crate, and for a time, he can afford to wait.


End file.
